Nobel Prize Winners

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination
of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up.
The danger
is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human
creature.
-Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

Saul Bellow's affectionate roman a clef about the renowned professor
Allan Bloom, author of the surprise bestseller The
Closing of the American Mind : How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy
and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987) (Allan
Bloom 1930-1992), stirred up quite a ruckus, because it
revealed to the public (it was apparently well known to his friends, students,
and colleagues) that Bloom was a homosexual who had died of AIDs, not liver
failure has had been pronounced the cause of death. Yet in the novel,
Bloom (Abe Ravelstein) specifically requires of Bellow (Chick) that he
write a memoir of him when he is gone and since Ravelstein is honest to
a fault, especially with his friends, it's hard to imagine that Bloom would
have objected to Bellow merely being truthful. More importantly,
Bloom's homosexuality--well, really the early and unnecessary death that
his homosexuality caused, ''destroyed by his reckless sex habits", is how
Chick
puts it--is the mystery that lies at the core of the book. There
would be no tension to the book without it and without our expectation
that Bellow will eventually unravel the mystery, and the ultimate failure
of the book is that he never does, perhaps can not.

The Ravelstein who emerges in these pages is a fascinating figure :
a physically large man; a mesmerizing pedagogue; a brilliant conversationalist;
mentor to many powerful political and academic players; and, like
Bellow's character Henderson, The Rain King,
he is a creature of wants, a man of enormous appetite for luxury.

He took you from antiquity to the Enlightenment,
and then—by way of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau onward to Nietzsche,
Heidegger—to the present moment, to corporate, high-tech
America, its culture and its entertainments, its press, its educational
system, its
think tanks, its politics. He gave you a picture
of this mass democracy and its characteristic—woeful—human product. In
his classroom,
and the lectures were always packed, he coughed,
stammered, he smoked, bawled, laughed, he brought his students to their
feet and
debated, provoked them to single combat, examined,
hammered them. He didn't ask, "Where will you spend eternity?" as religious
the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, "With
what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?"

His conversations with Chick are much the best thing in the book, which
loses steam whenever Ravelstein is not on scene. The two share a
marvelous friendship, engaging each other on an elevated intellectual plane,
much as Bloom described in his posthumous book, Love & Friendship,
a plane upon which Ravelstein manifestly does not meet his soap opera addicted
lover. As the novel ends, Chick says, "You don't easily give up a creature
like Ravelstein to death." The reader is likely to agree.

What are we to make then of this man who was so in love with life, who
rejected the idea of eternity and so had nothing to hold on to but life
and thought and friendship, yet who in his personal behavior chose a self-destructive
course, sacrificing all three to mere pleasures of the flesh?
Bloom became famous, and quite rich, by telling us that American education,
indeed the American mind, was being diminished by the failure to study
and engage with the great philosophers of the Western tradition.
The book made him a hero to conservatives and anathema to the Left.
But what did he himself believe; what was his personal philosophy,
or was his philosophy just that it was good to study philosophy?

Here Bellow gives us a clue to the problem :

Though I was his senior by some years he saw himself
as my teacher. Well, that was his trade--he was an educator.
He never presented
himself as a philosopher--professors of philosophy
were not philosophers. He had had a philosophical training
and had learned how a
philosophical life should be lived. That was
what philosophy was about, and this was why one read Plato. If he
had to choose between
Athens and Jerusalem, among us the two main sources
of higher life, he chose Athens, while full of respect for Jerusalem.
But in his last
days it was the Jews he wanted to talk about, not
the Greeks.

Yes, in the midst of one's life it may seem sufficient to think about
all the big ideas, but shouldn't one also choose from among them and create
a moral structure for one's life? As Ravelstein lies dying he does
focus on the fact of his own Jewishness, as if, finally brought to the
brink of the void, he suddenly realizes the importance of the ethical
life too. But Bellow does not explore this any further. Instead,
after Ravelstein's death he turns to his own near death experience, after
eating some bad fish, and his struggle to write the book.

Throughout the book Ravelstein and Chick discuss Chick's lack of perception.
At one point Chick says :

I do shut off my receptors sometimes and decide,
somehow, not to see what there is to be seen.

The reader can't help wishing that Bellow had seen what was there to
see. It might have transformed a decent but minor book into an excellent
and important one, one that would explain how this exceptional man reconciled
his atheism and his licentiousness with the conservative impulse.
That it fails utterly in this task makes it a great disappointment.